Race relations
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday October 9, 2009
Holden or Ford? Red lion or blue oval? Which camp you're in can be a tribal thing €” and it's a line rarely crossed. Buying an Australian performance car is not like buying any other vehicle. It's a rite of passage.As well as picking up an automobile, you're declaring to the world that you've arrived, that you're at the point where you can turn a schoolyard fantasy into reality.You're also making an extremely tribal statement, announcing whether you belong to the Ford camp or the Holden camp.As we all know, the boundaries between these two arch rivals are well established and almost never crossed. Feeling for both sides runs deep and transcends mere brand loyalty.And just as performance-car owners are welded to their brand, most are firmly convinced that home-grown vehicles of all stripes are as close as you'll get on this earth to perfection.It could be they have a point. After 40 years of evolution, these are vehicles that perfectly match local conditions and tastes.Unlike Europe, where the hot hatch is the road-burner of choice, or Japan, where high-tech rules the roost, Australian performance cars took their lead from North America.In the 1960s, US car companies figured that cramming a large engine into a medium-sized car was a fast track to affordable performance and we happily followed suit, adding a local slant to the idea.Ford fired the first shot by shoe-horning a 4.7-litre V8 engine into a 1967 family car to create the first Falcon GT.Holden was quick to follow and even went one better by engineering a two-door coupe version of its family-wheels Kingswood for 1968. Dubbed the Monaro, like the Falcon GT it was powered by a V8 engine.From there, it's been a case of refining the concept but, at the same time, making improvements in every department, from speed to handling and, yes, even fuel economy.Along the way, one prestigious annual event determined the success or otherwise of the cars involved: Bathurst. It's more than a place, it's where legends are made and cars are elevated to cult status.To win at Bathurst back in the '60s and '70s (much as it is today) was a powerful boost to the fortunes of the car involved.It's less intense today as the race cars involved bear scant resemblance to the models in showrooms but 30 and 40 years ago it was a vastly different story.Win on Sunday, sell on Monday was a term that could have been invented for the Bathurst classic.The modern Australian performance car is a truly capable machine, even if the market trends that have driven its development suddenly seem a bit at odds with how the vehicles are actually used.For instance, a modern Holden SS is now geared for something like a 400km/h top speed (not that it would actually manage it) regardless of the fact that even the Northern Territory now has a 130km/h blanket open-road speed limit.On the other hand, that super-tall gearing means the same car will lope along at that 130km/h for hours on end with decent fuel economy thrown in.Maybe average Aussie petrol-heads aren't as impetuous as the general media is keen to make them out. The other anomaly in all of this is the way the "family" variants of the same cars have also improved.In fact, the garden-variety Australian big car now has performance and handling that would shame any local performance car of a couple of decades ago and yet these cooking models are the cars that do the daily school or supermarket or volleyball run.Which begs the question: how much performance do you really need? Then again, need has never overtaken desire in this segment of the market.More recently, Holden and Ford figured they could tap into a better-heeled buyer by offering a more upmarket, better-equipped, even faster variation on the same theme. In Holden's case, HSV (Holden Special Vehicles) was born in 1988 out of the ashes of Peter Brock's HDT operation.It was originally tasked with developing the cars that would form the basis of Holden's racing team in the late '80s but rule changes to touring-car racing have made that role redundant.Over at Ford, early attempts at a similar marketing thread to Holden's HSV were doomed due to several years of indecision but since the '90s the FPV franchise has been Ford's answer to the HSV juggernaut.Never as successful in sheer volume terms, FPV nevertheless plays an important role for those who want something a little more special than a Falcon and would rather push a Ford than drive a Holden.Like we said, it's a tribal thing.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald
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